Your favorite TV show sucks
July 26, 2016 5:59 PM Subscribe

Mad Men to Seinfeld: TV's most criminally overrated shows — The Guardian's reviewers unburden themselves.

Friends: “A fast-food sitcom that prized lukewarm consistency over wit or invention.“

Seinfeld: “An exercise in actorly masochism.“

Mad Men: “Just a meandering soap.“

The West Wing: “Not quite the smuggest TV show ever made, but that’s only because The Newsroom exists.“

Lost: “The ultimate in tease TV.“

This Is England: “A production line of endless bleak trauma.“

Downton Abbey: “All that’s missing is amnesia and evil twins.“

Battlestar Galactica: “Cringeworthy cod-philosophical dialogue.“

The Walking Dead: “Moves so slowly it can feel as if you’re physically wading through time itself.“

Arrested Development: “Far too happy with itself to make me happy too.“

posted by Johnny Wallflower (193 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite

Can I start the pileon of Friends? I was kind of out of the loop in high school for refusing to watch it after five minutes of the show left me disgusted. Thinking maybe I was just being a contrary teen I tried to watch an episode a couple years ago and realized that the show actually does just suck.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:04 PM on July 26, 2016 [37 favorites]

The West Wing: “Not quite the smuggest TV show ever made, but that’s only because The Newsroom exists.“

IT'S OK TO BE SMUG IF YOU'RE RIGHT.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:09 PM on July 26, 2016 [61 favorites]

Friends pretty much disappeared culturally from the 90s until just a few years ago, I have no idea why it;s having it;s weird little moment.

As for the rest, it's a weird mix of hot-take central and soft targets. I mean, Downton Abbey, come on, maybe some Americas take it seriously because of accents but you're a UK paper, everyone there knows it's soapy ITV melodrama shite.
posted by Artw at 6:10 PM on July 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

Downton Abbey: “All that’s missing is amnesia and evil twins.“

Isn't that kind of the appeal, though? It's like Dynasty, but with interesting accents and prettier clothes?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:12 PM on July 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

I honestly think this could be titled "Shows that went on too long".

Every show on the list had a couple of great seasons.
Problem is, they were on for 5 or 6.
posted by madajb at 6:13 PM on July 26, 2016 [13 favorites]

Mainly I like shouting Bolshevik slogans at it.
posted by Artw at 6:13 PM on July 26, 2016 [19 favorites]

I mean, Downton Abbey, come on, maybe some Americas take it seriously because of accents but you're a UK paper, everyone there knows it's soapy ITV melodrama shite.

PBS attempted to make an American Downton Abbey w/ Mercy Street and while the show was beautiful to look at, good lord it was a master class in what the BBC's input into Downton Abbey was and why it was important.

Like every chunk of dialogue ended with someone explicating the subtext, just in case anyone was confused. Literally if they ended everything one sentence earlier, it would've been a great show.
posted by griphus at 6:15 PM on July 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

Ctrl-f Breaking Bad, no results.

As you were.
posted by Existential Dread at 6:16 PM on July 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

Like remember when Guinan gave that great analogy for slavery in re: Data's humanity and Picard yelled "you're talking about slavery!"

Mercy Street had about 600 of those moments per episode.
posted by griphus at 6:17 PM on July 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

Oh god yes Seinfield: "an exercise in actorly masochism", not to mention the audience self-delusion.
posted by easily confused at 6:18 PM on July 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

I really, really don't like Seinfeld, but I don't think it's bad or overrated. It's just a kind of humor that doesn't appeal to me. I'm clear on the difference between "bad" and "not my thing."

But some of these objections seem to come down to "this is a soap opera," and that's only a problem if you're opposed to soap operas.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:20 PM on July 26, 2016 [15 favorites]

Seinfeld is a beautiful time capsule of NYC in a very specific time and place

I've rewatched it so many times I have no idea if it is actually funny though.
posted by griphus at 6:22 PM on July 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

*stabs Ross with a trident*

that escalated quickly
posted by mannequito at 6:22 PM on July 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

[The President says "by your logic" to God in Latin, and God responds] wow ... this is Beautiful,
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:25 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Seinfeld is a beautiful time capsule of NYC in a very specific time and place

Filmed in LA
posted by wabbittwax at 6:30 PM on July 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

Hollywood, USA
posted by griphus at 6:32 PM on July 26, 2016

If we will pile on, then I'll leave this right here:

thirtysomething

The whinging by so-called adults seemed endless. I want to believe the actors took the work to pay the bills.
posted by datawrangler at 6:32 PM on July 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

Downton Abbey did have an amnesia plot. Just no twins. But really, was the show that popular because they were fooled into thinking it was something it wasn't or was it just entertaining, funny, and nice to look at?
posted by bleep at 6:37 PM on July 26, 2016

Calling Mad Men a meandering soap is actually quite generous. It's more the meandering that I have a problem with than the soap part. It only became a soap because it couldn't hold its focus on anything. I still don't see how the lawnmower running over the dude's foot hasn't replaced "jumping the shark". At least the Fonz waterskiing over a shark was at least slightly amusing.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:37 PM on July 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

An Oral History Of ‘Mad Men’
posted by Artw at 6:39 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

The line about despairing for humanity if Mad Men's ending was supposed to be happy is spot on.
posted by gubo at 6:47 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

i'm just happy no one picked The Wire because i'd hate to have to cut someone

really i would though
posted by ZaphodB at 6:47 PM on July 26, 2016 [18 favorites]

Friends pretty much disappeared culturally from the 90s until just a few years ago, I have no idea why it;s having it;s weird little moment.

If you were the right age to be living like the 6, you got a distinct, almost pornographic joy from watching 6 people in your station in life, living pretty much like you lived, except, get this: without constantly being jammed in each other's armpits from being crowded into a small, tiny, non-airconditioned, tiny apartment.

That, some times, was better than sex.
posted by ocschwar at 6:48 PM on July 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

I remember people actually going to law school because they liked the show "L.A. Law". That's pretty dumb career planning, counselor!
posted by thelonius at 6:49 PM on July 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm of the age bracket where Seinfield was A Thing then and I still don't understand the big deal about it. Even now, I'd gnaw my own leg off rather than watch an episode.

Friends was the weird sweet spot for people I knew across subcultures. I still watch terrible episodes of that. It resonates more than the former.
posted by Kitteh at 6:52 PM on July 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm of the age bracket where Seinfield was A Thing then and I still don't understand the big deal about it. Even now, I'd gnaw my own leg off rather than watch an episode.

How many times has someone tried to immediately explain the Genius, Actually, of Seinfeld when you bring that up.
posted by griphus at 6:55 PM on July 26, 2016 [15 favorites]

He didn't diss Kojak, Barney Miller, or The Rockford Files. So I got no issues.
posted by jonmc at 6:59 PM on July 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

So the Battlestar Gallactica review says: "So no, the Battlestar box set doesn’t deserve to sit on the shelf beside Mad Men et al."

But Mad Men is also overrated, right? So doesn't it in fact belong on the same shelf?
posted by Metro Gnome at 7:02 PM on July 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

I'm of the age bracket where Seinfield was A Thing then and I still don't understand the big deal about it. Even now, I'd gnaw my own leg off rather than watch an episode.

Same, Kitteh, just the slappy bass gives me hate shivers (or ok, there is strong dislike). I feel like it was loaded with good concepts (like really funny, when you think of episodes in retrospect), but also with super uncomfortable acting (from some people who are really good actors, obviously not all ofc. I know we weren't supposed to like anyone, but I really feel they overshot that target.) There was just an ugliness in everything about it. Haven't changed my mind, having seen a few episodes since.

OTOH, love Curb Your Enthusiasm. Go figure.
posted by cotton dress sock at 7:03 PM on July 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Breaking Bad: "These idiots are doing it ALL wrong...I can't fucking stand it, anymore..."
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 7:10 PM on July 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

I did gnaw my on leg off instead of watching an episode of Seinfeld and that leg went on to pitch "Community", became addicted to coke, and ended up winning a Grammy. I wish people would realise that these apparently easy solutions often have significant repercussions.
posted by nfalkner at 7:18 PM on July 26, 2016 [12 favorites]

They are wrong about Mad Men and ...
They are perversely wrong about Mad Men and ...
They are idiotically wrong about Mad Men and ...
posted by Chitownfats at 7:19 PM on July 26, 2016 [14 favorites]

Friends was popular because it was consistently light hearted and fun. There are almost no terrible episodes. Also in the 90s we had a lot less to choose from. Watch Friends or watch one of the three movies we had on vhs for the 100th time?

The Walking Dipshits: I think everything that is wrong with that show can be explained by watching the writers interviews on the Talking Dead
posted by fshgrl at 7:22 PM on July 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

There was just an ugliness in everything about it.

But that was the point of the show.

The criticism in the linked piece similarly misses this:

How long can you maintain the illusion that anyone would truly give a mouse-sized shit about any of the infinitesimally small social solecisms that fill this world?...

It is further agony to watch Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards keep pumping energy and credibility into the roles of George, Elaine and Kramer in order to disguise the void that is “Jerry Seinfeld”

Seinfeld is about selfish, self-absorbed, vapid people and their petty, pointless struggles. It's a show about nothing. It's bizarre to level the premise of the show as a criticism of it.

It's like saying The Wire sucks because it's too bleak and they talk about drugs too much.
posted by Sangermaine at 7:38 PM on July 26, 2016 [39 favorites]

House of Cards. I tried to get through a few episodes, but the one in which they called a nationwide teachers' strike?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I can only wish such a thing could actually happen in the United States of America.
posted by mostly vowels at 7:41 PM on July 26, 2016 [8 favorites]

I know, Sangermaine, I got that. CYE explores similar territory. What I mean is that the ugliness of Seinfeld was in its texture. The grainy film. The blue-grey apartment. The particular pitch of Jason Alexander's whine, the hamminess and pacing of the acting in general.
posted by cotton dress sock at 7:41 PM on July 26, 2016

I still like Friends because it's mindlessly funny in a decently smart way. All the actors are good comedians, actually, and have really good chemistry with each other. It makes up for its flaws of being a formulaic sitcom where people behave in ways they wouldn't in real life because of that. Is Friends great TV? No. Is it entertaining? Yes, very much so.

If anyone thought Downton Abbey wasn't a nighttime soap in pretty clothes after that dude died after having sex in the first season, I'm really worried about them. That show was not high art. (I gave up after ... season 2? Season 3? I don't remember.)

I will always have affection for Lost. Was it a good show? I don't know. Did it help me through a really rough time with its whole "Let me just watch the next episode!" thing? Yes. So. I can't hate Lost.

I still need to watch Mad Men. Maybe. I watched the first few episodes and thought "This show is way too grownup for me."

I'm currently rewatching Gilmore Girls for the 1000th time and I find it more and more exhausting each time. But it's like, I don't know. Cheetos, let's say. You think this time, they're actually going to be as good as you remember. But there's something comforting in the fact they're not. They're familiar. So you just go with it.

(Buffy the Vampire Slayer also falls into this category for me now, but I tend to just skip to the episodes I like.)

In summary: Everything is terrible and maybe we should all leave our houses more instead of watching TV.

(But not until this season of Difficult People is done.)
posted by darksong at 7:42 PM on July 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

The Wire sucks because it's too bleak
posted by griphus at 7:44 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

House of Cards. I tried to get through a few episodes,

I actually think the most recent two seasons of House of Cards are vastly superior to the first two.

I agree with everything in the linked article but haven't seen This is England or Friends or Downton Abbey so can't speak to them.

If they'd written anything bad about Deadwood, though, I'd have killed the cockscuckers.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 7:45 PM on July 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

Also, in the most recent Comedians Drinking Coffee Together With Cars, Seinfeld calls himself out as a terrible actor and says he was bad in the show, "any time I was on screen." Agreed!
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 7:46 PM on July 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Seinfeld is about selfish, self-absorbed, vapid people and their petty, pointless struggles. It's a show about nothing. It's bizarre to level the premise of the show as a criticism of it.

This is what was good about it, when I thought about the show - the concepts, the situations & characters. Actually having to sit through Michael Richard's gurning slapstick was less good.

CYE is just less viscerally annoying and more fluid in terms of pacing etc.
posted by cotton dress sock at 7:51 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Friends is much improved by playing all the episodes at once.
posted by 3urypteris at 7:56 PM on July 26, 2016 [16 favorites]

Some of these shows aren't really over-rated in that they've never gotten acclaimed by critics. Lost was called by my friends the best worst show on TV. Don't get me started on the Walking Dumb which I note has never gotten any Emmy nominations other than special effects. Friends was never considered anything better than entertainment. Among genre fans, mere mention of the last two seasons of BSG will get some ranting and raging. And even among its fans (and I'm one) Downton has never been considered anything but a highly entertaining soap.

Try this again when you stop going after low-hanging fruit.
posted by Ber at 8:02 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm surprised to hear Seinfeld is largely considered over rated. I always thought it was underrated, particulary since it was on network television.

Fascinating to see how different our reactions are to these things.

I really loved Mad Men for awhile but I didn't start watching it until there were 4 or 5 seasons on Netflix. I found I didn't enjoy the real time seasons nearly as much.

I'm also surprised to see Battlestar Galactica is highly rated. I did find it very entertaining and enjoyable for the first couple of seasons but then it tanked so badly I can't recommend it at all to anyone.

Friends I barely remember and The Walking Dead another one that tanked.

Haven't seen any of the other shows.
posted by juiceCake at 8:12 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've always hated "Friends". What a bland generic sitcom. I now feel vindicated and smugly satisfied.
posted by a strong female character at 8:13 PM on July 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

I have seen eight of those shows. Of them, one was good the whole way. The others were all good for a while, and then went downhill. So, yeah, exactly, as madajb said, this is just a list of shows that went on too long. Declaring the praise heaped on a show early on as "overrating" based on the show going downhill later is like saying Michael Jordan's basketball skill was overrated because in his last year on court he wasn't very good, Bridget Bardot's beauty was overrated because of how she looks now, the Godfather was overrated because Godfather III sucked.
posted by Bugbread at 8:24 PM on July 26, 2016

I'd largely agree that Seinfeld is the worst part of Seinfeld.
posted by Artw at 8:28 PM on July 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

I never could figure out the great love for The Wire. I found it deadly dull and struggled to finish the first season, watched the first episode of the second and gave up for good.
posted by octothorpe at 8:29 PM on July 26, 2016

I totally forgot my friends reprogrammed my auto correct to switch the Walking Dead to the Walking D******s. Ha. That was the episode they let the dead out of the quarry.

Anyone know how to change it back? I prefer Walking Morons, personally.
posted by fshgrl at 8:29 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I could never really get into Seinfeld (maybe it was the laff track?) but I think Curb Your Enthusiasm is sublime.
posted by My Dad at 8:31 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

the hamminess and pacing of the acting in general

I like Seinfeld but boy, the acting is so hammy and sing-songy it's ridiculous. I have a certain nostalgic affection for it, because it reminds me of how all these people I knew in high school would put that same voice on all the time, but I kinda can't believe that delivery was ever part of such a popular comedy.
posted by en forme de poire at 8:31 PM on July 26, 2016

Nobody else is going to say Sex & The City? There was a period of time where people were walking around describing other people as "a Samantha" or "(blank's) Mr. Big" and there were giant cloth flowers and Cosmopolitans everywhere and ... ugh.
posted by queensissy at 8:41 PM on July 26, 2016 [17 favorites]

The Wire sucks because it's too bleak
posted by griphus at 10:44 PM on July 26 [+] [!]

we've established my feelings on this and i apologize in advance for my actions

shink
posted by ZaphodB at 8:42 PM on July 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm of the age bracket where Seinfield was A Thing then and I still don't understand the big deal about it.

What's the deal with Seinfeld?
posted by obscure simpsons reference at 8:55 PM on July 26, 2016 [29 favorites]

Sheeeittt.
posted by RobotHero at 8:56 PM on July 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Soooo...

Friends - comfort TV. I don't exactly go my way to watch it, but in general it's 30 minutes of decent TV.

Seinfeld - although I also don't go my way to watch it these days, there was a world of difference between the Horsing Arounds of the 80s and Seinfeld. Calling it overrated now, with a crapload of sitcoms for every niche is a bit rich.

Mad Men - if people wanted to look more into the reading choices and speculate on the reading choices of characters (instead of more likely, Weiner checking wikipedia for books released in 196x and thinking "what would this character read now?"), that's people's fault for overanalyzing. It's as tightly written, well acted show with fantastic production values.

West Wing - Was never that much into it. But it was a typical Sorkin production. Smug as hell, very idealised view on the topic. If he knew what was going to happen in 2016, it would be a different show, for certain.

Lost - Quit the show after missing an episode, and couldn't follow the one after. Would probably fare better in the binge watching era, but... is it overrated? My idea is that most people think it's a pile of convoluted crap about midway through.

This Is England, Downton Abbey, BG, Walking Dead - barely or didn't watch.

Arrested Development - I agree with the comments. Just don't see it as a problem.
posted by lmfsilva at 8:57 PM on July 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

What's the deal with Seinfeld?
posted by obscure simpsons reference

Could you be any more 90s?
posted by en forme de poire at 8:59 PM on July 26, 2016 [51 favorites]

I gave up on The Walking Dead when they were in the jail and none of them (or I guess one guy) thought to lock the cells while they sleep, so, you know, the obvious doesn't happen. I figured they were all too stupid to live and go zombies.

House of Cards. I tried to get through a few episodes, but the one in which they called a nationwide teachers' strike?

House of Cards has a weird mix of boring and OTT that I'm pretty much just hate-watching it at this point. Veep is so much better.

I really like Seinfeld, even Jerry's crappy acting. That scene with the library cop going on the tirade and seeing Jerry trying really hard not to break just makes it even funnier.
posted by dirigibleman at 9:02 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Because of Lost, I will never ever watch any long form "story" TV series again. The X-Files reboot was another long form that just died at the end or maybe they were all dead to begin with, who knows. But Arrested Development told a long form story and it worked. Cheers for them!
posted by njohnson23 at 9:11 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Mad Men season 1 holds up.

Most of the other conventional sitcoms and dramas have seams showing, by which I mean characters take certain actions or make certain decisions not because of who they are but because if they did anything else there would be no show. I have little patience for that.
posted by infinitewindow at 9:12 PM on July 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

It's as tightly written, well acted show with fantastic production values.

I agree with the last two parts, but it's the writing I have a problem with. Not the writing within any given episode, which is often pretty good, but the story arcs just don't have enough dynamism for me -- I think "meandering" is a perfect way to describe it. Things just kind of keep iterating over the same ground, and I felt like I was led to expect more from the beginning of Season 1. Maybe that's just an unavoidable feature of the way American TV is serialized? IDK.
posted by en forme de poire at 9:15 PM on July 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Seinfeld is about selfish, self-absorbed, vapid people and their petty, pointless struggles. It's a show about nothing. It's bizarre to level the premise of the show as a criticism of it.

It's like saying The Wire sucks because it's too bleak and they talk about drugs too much.

Yeah, I guess it's been long enough since Friends and Seinfeld were on the air that the context is getting lost.

The acting on Seinfeld? That was the point. They were barely acting at all, that was part of the shtick, like you were watching a local improv group that didn't care that much. They were all unlikable on purpose. It was a send up of a sitcom. At the time there hadn't been anything like it, and it took a really long time to catch on because people weren't sure what to think.

For the most part, in my memory, everyone was not a FAN back then like now, you did not have to pledge allegiance and make a stand with what shows you watched. I don't mean that as a put down at all, it just was not as big a deal what shows you watched. Friends was kind of funny sometimes, so I watched it if it was on. Most people I knew felt that way. There wasn't as much competition. If you had 2 million people that LOVED Friends and 20 million that thought it was OK and watched you had a huge hit. Now the superfans are most of the audience for most shows and you don't have as many casual viewers.

In its first airing, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David‘s sitcom had an 8.0 rating. That was good enough to make it the No. 14 show of summer 1989. Today, an 8.0 rating would tie it with “Sunday Night Football” for TV’s biggest show.

To underline that: Today’s top show of the year ties the No. 14 show of the summer in 1989, an era when summer was considered a TV dead zone.

In the regular 1989-90 season, the fast-renamed “Seinfeld” was the No. 17 show with a 9.5 rating — far better than the rating of any show on the air today. “Seinfeld” became the top-rated show in later seasons.
posted by bongo_x at 9:16 PM on July 26, 2016 [11 favorites]

Huh -- people I knew were DEFINITELY Seinfeld superfan nerds in the same way as people were about the Simpsons, but it may have been a weirdly non-representative sample I guess.
posted by en forme de poire at 9:24 PM on July 26, 2016

Isn't the whole "Adjective McAdjectiveson" construct that is so popular here a Ross-ism from Friends?

Could you be any more 90s?

This whole thing is so subjective I don't even know why we are discussing it. It's a moo point.
posted by Room 641-A at 9:33 PM on July 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

How you doin'?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:40 PM on July 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Seinfeld is obnoxious because of the smugness of all involved; every second you get that "we're so cool" vibe. On the other hand, I love how, in each episode, the plotlines spin around each other, helix-like, to come together at the end in a truly comical and/or ironic way. Hate it for some things (namely the actors), but the writing on Seinfeld was great.
posted by zardoz at 9:41 PM on July 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

The last season of Battlestar Galactica is easier to take if you think of it as 39,698 beautiful but frequently annoying people just living their lives in approximately 50 apartments.
posted by gnomeloaf at 9:42 PM on July 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

Hollywood, USA

Universal City, USA.
posted by notyou at 9:49 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

He didn't diss Kojak, Barney Miller, or The Rockford Files. So I got no issues.

One of these is not like the others.
posted by notyou at 9:54 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

♪ Watch the Rockford Files, call to see if Paul can score some weed ♫

namely the actors

GASP, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was flawless
posted by en forme de poire at 9:59 PM on July 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five?
posted by R.F.Simpson at 10:23 PM on July 26, 2016 [52 favorites]

The very first episode of Seinfeld I ever watched, sitting at the dinner table with my partner, Jerry was finishing washing some dishes and putting them in a little drying rack, and I exclaimed "hey, those are the same dishes we're eating off of right now!" -- and so they were: "Joni" Dixie Dogwood.

I only saw a few more episodes, and I couldn't get over how a man of whatever age he was could look so much, in some indefinable way, like the Platonic Ideal of a thirteen-year-old boy.

I catch glimpses of him now in news stories from time to time, and I look at what he's made of that face and I say to myself 'how . . . . beautiful!'
posted by jamjam at 10:24 PM on July 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

On my first date with my now-fiancée, she stopped our conversation while I was mid-sentence to say, "Before this date goes any further, I need to know how you feel about the Battlestar Galactica finale."

Without missing a beat, I replied, "A fucking wizard did it!? Fuck that finale."

Apparently, that was the right thing to say. We will be married next June.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 10:27 PM on July 26, 2016 [44 favorites]

The acting on Seinfeld? That was the point. They were barely acting at all, that was part of the shtick, like you were watching a local improv group that didn't care that much. They were all unlikable on purpose. It was a send up of a sitcom. At the time there hadn't been anything like it, and it took a really long time to catch on because people weren't sure what to think.

Yes, understood, the aim was executed, this is a mark of art; understood it at the time also; it made me grit my teeth; not only I did not like gritting my teeth, I found the effort not worth the teeth-gritting
posted by cotton dress sock at 10:29 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also, in the most recent Comedians Drinking Coffee Together With Cars, Seinfeld calls himself out as a terrible actor and says he was bad in the show, "any time I was on screen." Agreed.

He's been saying that for the last 25 years. Yes, even when the show was airing. It's not a coincidence that the character is him.
posted by Etrigan at 10:32 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Every fan of Battlestar Galactica has a canon ending in their head that is a thousand times better than what was delivered. This includes the rotting carp on the side of a riverbank that somehow managed to catch an episode. Now imagine waiting years between seasons. Years. For that shit payoff. My gods.

On the other hand, people are STILL finding hidden jokes in Arrested Development and it is probably responsible for more sales of "The Final Countdown" than anything else. Some things in life are constant: there's always money in the banana stand, and GOB is not on board with bees.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:34 PM on July 26, 2016 [10 favorites]

GASP, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was flawless

Fake, fake, fake, fake.
posted by Room 641-A at 10:49 PM on July 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm glad this conversation doesn't mention Game of Thrones. Because, for whatever production values and pretensions that series has, ultimately it is our generation's Dynasty, or Dallas, or whatever prestige primetime soap opera series. And that's all needs to be said about its role in culture, at least until the show is actually over.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:07 PM on July 26, 2016 [5 favorites]

Friends is much improved by playing all the episodes at once.
posted by 3urypteris at 3:56 AM on July 27

You can actually feel that gazing into thee
posted by fullerine at 11:12 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

All this makes me wonder whether there exists a show that is universally liked.

Freaks and Geeks would be a likely candidate.
posted by Captain Fetid at 11:23 PM on July 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

Mainly I like shouting Bolshevik slogans at it.
posted by Artw at 6:13 PM on July 26 [8 favorites +] [!]

You should have me over some time!
posted by mwhybark at 11:37 PM on July 26, 2016

You miss the point, British people. The West Wing is science fiction and "Wouldn't it be cool if our elected leaders were smart people who cared about the world?" is a hell of a premise for a science fiction story.

I feel the same way about Friends. If you can put aside the reality of income inequality and the reality of white privilege and accept the premise that seven beautiful young people can live large in Manhattan without a million dollar parental subsidy or without eating dog food or work exchanging sex for drugs it's actually extremely witty and well written. It's kind of like Beverly Hills 90210 in that respect. Science fiction.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 11:41 PM on July 26, 2016 [7 favorites]

As someone actively repulsed by the "Golden Age of TV" discourse, this tickles me so much.
posted by Gin and Broadband at 11:42 PM on July 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Say, Art, we could just shout Bolshevik slogans at all of these shows!

Seems like kids and spouses might be frowny at the practice, mind.
posted by mwhybark at 11:48 PM on July 26, 2016

I laughed at the Downton Abbey one because it reminds me of the time I astonished my parents by predicting what was going to happen next even though I'd never watched the show before.

Not that I did it in a mean spirited way, like, being disdainful of it all. I was just trying to follow along with the show during one my visits to them (while also fighting off jetlag so I'm not even sure if I've ever watched a full episode without dozing off), and my many hundreds of hours of watching Korean dramas means I'm well versed in all the soap opera tropes, and basically the plot of Downton Abbey is like any standard k-drama just in a unique time and place.

So I agree that Downton Abbey is a soap but I see no problem with that especially since the handful of episodes I did end up sorta-watching were pretty entertaining and visually gorgeous. I should probably really watch it some day.

(Also amnesia is a very important staple in k-dramas, so that's apparently a prediction I would have gotten wrong.)

Arrested Development is one of the few shows I've actually watched on this list and don't agree with the original author's perception. Unless he's talking about season four then maybe yes because that felt a little like it was trying too hard by bringing it back and didn't make me laugh like the original three seasons, although it was fun seeing everyone again. I've also watched Friends but I was in elementary school when it first aired so in my world it's just always been something you catch randomly in re-runs. In that sense, I agree with the author because yeah there's that "it's on all the time and you just grew up with it around you" nostalgia. But I will tune into it more than I will with other re-runs because there are some episodes that still make me laugh.
posted by paisley sheep at 11:55 PM on July 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Shorter Guardian Staff: "We told you years ago to stop liking these popular things. And now we're back to say: Stop liking these popular things!"

I look forward to their "pick[s] of the most underrated TV shows tomorrow," aka, "Why don't you yet like these unpopular things we told you to like?"
posted by ejs at 12:08 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

thirtysomething

Yet the show had a cancer storyline which is as good as anything I've seen on TV. I'd recommend the entire series just for that.

As for overrated, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, easily, but it spawned the criminally underrated spinoff Lou Grant, which was years ahead of it's time.
posted by Beholder at 12:09 AM on July 27, 2016

I didn't like Friends at all. Worse than the show itself, which was easy to avoid, were the ads for it that would air all the time, which had corny highlights which they'd obviously chosen as showcasing the absolute peak funny of the show's humour. Example: Joey confuses "homo sapiens" with "homosexuals". This is as good as it gets, folks!
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 12:12 AM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

To be clear: I don't dismiss the importance or utility of TV criticism. I do dismiss the importance and utility of whatever years-later axe grinding is happening in this article.
posted by ejs at 12:17 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wait was there actually a show called My Mother The Car? and, if so, please tell me somewhere on the internet there's a bizarre fan made crossover with the Stallone movie Stop or My Mom Will Shoot!?

this is important
posted by mannequito at 12:21 AM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Ugh, the "soap opera" criticism is so lazy. I've never seen anyone deploy it who either went on to substantiate the claim with specifics or who even seemed to really understand what they meant by the term.

I've never really thought about this before, and I'm not 100% sure I agree with it, but it's a good point. The phrase does seem to get thrown around a lot. I feel like, at its worst, it means something like "show that is focused primarily on relationships that I happen to dislike."
posted by breakin' the law at 12:57 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Seinfeld: “An exercise in actorly masochism.“

Ah, Seinfeld. I, somewhat like griphus, have seen so many episodes of Seinfeld so many times that I am probably not well-placed to judge it. It's, like, part of the background music of my life.

That said, I can kind of see why some people don't like it. At this point, I've developed a strong preference for the earlier seasons of the show, when it hews more closely to the "show about nothing" ethos and the characters don't seem like such terrible people all the time. Neurotic and self-centered, yes, but not, like, totally despicable.

As for the rest of these shows...

Friends: I'm sorry, but Friends sucks. Friends always sucked, although if you want to argue it sucked a little bit less in the very beginning I might be OK with that.

Mad Men: I unapologetically love Mad Men. I do not think it jumped the shark, though that next-to-last season was a little shaky. You want to argue it's a soap opera, fine - in a way, I think that's one of its strengths.

The West Wing: I also unapologetically love The West Wing. Maybe it was a little smug, so what?

Lost: Never seen it.

This is England: Never seen it. Never even heard of it until now (maybe it's a UK thing?).

Downton Abbey: Seen bits and pieces of it. It's not groundbreaking television, but it's fine.

Battlestar Gallactica: Never seen it.

The Walking Dead: Never seen it, don't want to. I know people whose tastes I respect who say it is a great show. They might be correct, but I have sort of a bias against shit with zombies. Now, I will fully admit that there isn't any great intellectual principle behind this. It's not about realism or snobbery or thinking genre fiction is "stupid" - I watch Game of Thrones, for chrissakes. It's just that, for some reason I can't quite put my finger on, the zombie/horror aesthetic really turns me off.

Arrested Development: I like Arrested Development - I might even say I like it a lot - but I do think it is probably somewhat overrated.
posted by breakin' the law at 1:20 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

RF Simpson: that's one of the funniest things I've read in some time.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:43 AM on July 27, 2016

There were some brilliant ideas on Seinfeld. I still think of and quote lines from it and laugh. I've not watched it in a long time, though.

The first couple episodes of BSG are amazing.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:46 AM on July 27, 2016

Friends probably objectively sucks. But similar to what someone else has said about Seinfeld, I have watched it for far too long to know the difference. It's like that disgusting bathrobe that should have been thrown out years ago and washed way more than it has been. For me, there is nothing like having a hangover on a Saturday morning and eating some hot ramen and watching 27 hours of Friends.
posted by like_neon at 1:49 AM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

mannequito: "Wait was there actually a show called My Mother The Car?"

My Mother the Car

Concept: Guy buys car that turns out to be the reincarnation of his dead mother.
posted by Bugbread at 2:55 AM on July 27, 2016

Every fan of Battlestar Galactica has a canon ending in their head...

I think the canon ending (Season 3 Episode 4) was great. Using the crowning-moment-of-awesome Adama maneuver humanity escapes the Cylon prison planet and flees into the unknown.

That was the final episode. So say we all.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:23 AM on July 27, 2016 [16 favorites]

Yeah, if we're going the head-canon route, I have a rule of thumb that the finale to season 2 of any given show is usually the "best" ending. Anything after that is tedious epilogue almost certain to destroy the goodwill of any viewer who unwisely stays along for the ride. Think of Six Feet Under. In the finale of season 2, Nate gets on the bus. How cool is that? We don't know what the bus is (other than a giant, diesel-spewing metaphor for uncertainty and death) or where it's going, but it's fantastic. I wanted Nate to get on that bus and to never be seen again. But no. We had a bunch more seasons where the writers made every character go on a dark sexual journey and wrote "edgy" (i.e. cluelessly offensive) subplots about race. Just ... ugh.

I'll class Lost as another victim of the two-season rule. First two seasons—soapy and overblown, yes; but also full of space and possibility and a curious sense of the sublime. Seasons 3 through 5 were the ones where the writers systematically smashed every premise and piece of set-dressing that was in any way interesting and replaced it with Jack's mopey, bearded face, while season 6 was a haphazard attempt to glue all the broken pieces of the show together again, wrap it up in old gift paper they found under the dresser, and present it to the viewer as "one for the shippers." Yeah, that worked.

The Walking Dead: Never seen it, don't want to.

My wife—a TV maven—watches this show. I don't, because zombies. She says that the early episodes are a clear-headed demonstration of why Hobbes was right and Locke was wrong about civil society (which may explain why it's so unpopular with politically conservative audiences), but then it mostly becomes about how Rick is awesome. So yeah.
posted by Sonny Jim at 4:10 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

On Friends:

There are things about it that are objectively bad. The jokes tend toward low-hanging fruit and plotting is usually cheap farce misunderstanding type nonsense. However, I watched it when it aired and enjoyed it in part because I became familiar and comfortable with the characters. I would suggest that the 4th and 5th seasons are actually pretty good, but the first two seasons are terrible and everything after Chandler and Monica get married is a waste of time. I still like the characters. Except Ross. Ross is the worst (not the worst on the show, the worst in the universe).

On Seinfeld:

I know that Jerry's acting is bad. He is not really believable as a human being. But his comic timing is impeccable. Even while straining believability, he always landed the joke. He's more cartoon than man. And the other three were really good.
posted by wabbittwax at 4:19 AM on July 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

As for overrated, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, easily

Pistols at dawn, sir.
posted by Mogur at 4:40 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Neurotic and self-centered, yes, but not, like, totally despicable.

So often I see this kind of reaction as an explanation of why someone doesn't like this show, that book, whatever. I think dislikable characters are much more interesting than likable ones. Without dislikable characters, everything would be Mayberry RFD. (I am, of course, a Seinfeld fan.)
posted by scratch at 5:07 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think people are talking about Friends because it's on Netflix (in some countries, I know I watched it there). There's a lot to criticize the show about but for me, as a teenager, it was the first show I remember seeing where women enjoyed sex and had agency in picking their partners. I'm sure there were others but that had an impact on me.
posted by betsybetsy at 5:13 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Costanza was Daffy Duck...smart enough to know right from wrong, too venal to care. He got his comeuppance constantly. But maybe those of you who havr never felt the temptation to eat eclairs out the trash or wondered if you might push past grandmas and kids to save yourself in a fire can't relate.
posted by emjaybee at 5:20 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

I've tried to get into Mad Men twice now and have dropped it twice - I just find all the characters to be horrible people and have no interest in their stories. People gush and foam at the mouth about it so much that there's a part of me that feels like I'm stupid and "just don't get it."

The production and attention to details from the 1960's is impressive but that's really not enough to carry the show for me.
posted by Gev at 5:22 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Supernatural now going into Season 12 - with Rick Springfield as Lucifer, "amnesia and evil twins" are nothing to the show that does meta-meta-fiction tv done right.
posted by mfoight at 5:36 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

That was the final episode. So say we all.

If anyone hasn't seen it wants to start the show then that indeed is the perfect jumping off point.
posted by Artw at 5:49 AM on July 27, 2016

I'm so glad season 5 of The Americans is the last season. It's a great show that deserves a solid ending and I think they will finish it with style.
posted by Pendragon at 5:59 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wait, I'm just reading that The Americans is getting a season 6 in 2018. Nevermind, it's probably going to suck :-)
posted by Pendragon at 6:03 AM on July 27, 2016

Breaking Bad seriously sucks because of cheesy, cartoonish Latino assassins and mobsters. There, I said it.
posted by thelamest at 6:15 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Isn't it only recently, the past 10 years or so, that people actually began to think that maybe TV shows don't have to be terrible? But by then you had 50 years of mostly mind rotting garbage: My MOther the Car, Gilligan's Island, The Dukes of Hazzard, Friends. I loved Seinfeld, but it's not that funny anymore. At the time it was compared to the Honeymooners for its influence, millennials might feel it's already that dated.

It's more that in the past 10 years, general ratings have been so low that shows are obliged to be as high quality as they can to draw word of mouth and acclaim.

Also, wondering what I saw in any version of Scooby Doo from the 20th century.
posted by ZeusHumms at 6:38 AM on July 27, 2016

I think the "soap opera" criticism is highly gendered, which is a handy way to dismiss things.

DINGDINGDINGDING!!!

It was so blatant in Doctor Who fandom that I now can't hear the term "soap opera" without ascribing misogyny to the speaker.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:40 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Isn't the "soap opera" complaint more like, "How is it possible that so many rare, bad things could happen to one group of people, in such a particular order as to maximize the badness?"

Or is the Internet using it differently now?

i need to get on snapchat before the kids these days eclipse me forever

#kidsthesedays
posted by radicalawyer at 6:55 AM on July 27, 2016

Breaking Bad seriously sucks because of cheesy, cartoonish Latino assassins and mobsters. There, I said it.

Well. it also has great stuff like the scene where Gus Fring shows Jesse how, if you need to feed a bunch of guys, you buy a vegetable tray from the supermarket deli.
posted by thelonius at 7:09 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

radicalawyer: "Isn't the "soap opera" complaint more like, "How is it possible that so many rare, bad things could happen to one group of people, in such a particular order as to maximize the badness?"

Or is the Internet using it differently now?"

I think it's a dog whistle. A "dog whistle" isn't a terrible term, it's a normal term that some people use as secret code to express terrible things. So some people use "soap opera" as veiled misogyny, and some people use "soap opera" to mean "an unending tidal wave of personal drama and backstabbing and secrets and romantic dalliances and breakups and the like."

I think Mad Men is a soap opera, in the non-dog-whistle sense.
posted by Bugbread at 7:12 AM on July 27, 2016

For some reason, the underrated shows article selects... Top Gear. Yes. Top Gear.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:34 AM on July 27, 2016

Yeah, 90% of the time 'soap opera' is gendered and sexist. I still use it as I feel there's an actual use to the term, but understand why people might look at me side-eyed for it.

When I say "soap opera-y", I mean two things:

1. Implausible, recurrent bad luck used only to heighten the emotional stakes.
2. The logic of the setting (as established in show, even if it's not 'realistic'), or the logic of relationships and characters, are consistently ignored to heighten drama.

What I mean by that second one:
Downton Abbey's second season takes place with large time jumps between episodes. Despite this, things are blissfully static. That sexual proposition from last episode, between two people living in the same place? Still unresolved, for months. Why? You think they would have had some conversation about it since, but apparently not. Relationships are fixed in place until they can be handily addressed when the soldiers are back in town so that no one is having a 'quiet week'. Bates and his lady have a pointlessly murderous time just because it's... a good kick? Did that storyline ever make sense? (Similarly, the murder storyline in season 2 of Friday Night Lights is soap opera-ish and a terrible thing for both of the regulars involved, in a show that is otherwise grounded and sensible).

Or Sons of Anarchy. Sons is a soap with bikers. This fellow has killed many people in his time, but fails to kill this one boss from close range because the show would rather that the lead kill this man in a few years but wrote itself into a corner. And none of the other 500 characters , who all have cause to kill this boss, will try to murder his decrepit rear, even though he should be a persona non grata by now. This other character is normally smart and iron-fisted, but here, she's going act like an idiot because it's the only way to move other pieces into place. A baby MacGuffin. Magical CIA agents! Attempted suicides! Porn drama! Jailhouse mutilations! THE WORST. If anyone here is even passingly interested in this show, watch only the first two seasons (which still have problems, as Sutter is a provocateur first and a writer second) and then bail with the mystery of the missing baby unsolved. Just imagine the baby crawled off to find a better family and show.

So by that metric, I don't find shows like Call the Midwife soap opera-ish because things progress in a way that makes internal sense, at least for the few seasons I've seen. A nun who was clearly in an awkward place slowly works towards a solution. Relationships develop slowly (especially for the time) and realistically. There's bristles to relationships that aren't over- or under-played. It is often very treacly and pat, but the plotlines, character arcs, and the timings of the above, make sense. (I'm ignoring Christmas episodes, as I don't like any Christmas episode of any UK show.)
posted by flibbertigibbet at 7:48 AM on July 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

As for overrated, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, easily, but it spawned the criminally underrated spinoff Lou Grant, which was years ahead of it's time.

I don't know that MTM has dated well (my spouse is re-watching the whole series from start to end on DVD), but that's not the same thing as saying it's "easily" overrated, which is ridiculous. It's got a ton of classic episodes and its character development is bar none.

Most 70s sitcoms (and most sitcoms in general, for that matter) have not dated well. In fact, I can't think of one from the 70s that has dated well, save for M*A*S*H (and even that's a stretch). A very different time, etc., etc. I'm not sure that Lou Grant is underrated as much as virtually unknown. Again, two different things.

On the other shows, Friends didn't always suck if you were there when it was on its original run and you were drawn in by its particular depiction of a group of tightknit, self-absorbed white 90s twentysomethings and their meaningless travails. It didn't suck any more than any other sitcom from the 90s, and was probably vastly better than most. Come on ..... Everybody Loves Raymond? Home Improvement? That '70s Show? The King of Queens? Mad about You? Dharma & Greg, for God's sake, shoot me now? And hey, what about Just Shoot Me? For that matter, Roseanne, the most overrated of the overrated?

This writer elevating Friends to the summit of suckage and ignoring those other shows, which were way worse, is confounding, but perhaps not so much given that Friends is the subject of more hagiography than any of those other shows. Same with Seinfeld, which again, if you were there, "there's nothing wrong with that," but otherwise, a resounding meh.
posted by blucevalo at 7:54 AM on July 27, 2016

And lest I forget, Married with Children ..... God, what a systematically, brutalizingly, comprehensively awful show that was.
posted by blucevalo at 7:56 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

When I say "soap opera-y", I mean two things:

Thank you, that pretty much encapsulates it. I get that some might consider it a dog whistle but for many it's just as flibbertigibbet expresses. There's an overwhelming sense of melodrama and a great reliance on either idiot plots (I think Gene Siskel defined that best) and the constant delaying one party getting crucial knowledge to another. If character A only told character B one fucking thing about what's going on the entire story arc would collapse.
posted by Ber at 7:58 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

This writer elevating Friends to the summit of suckage and ignoring those other shows, which were way worse, is confounding, but perhaps not so much given that Friends is the subject of more hagiography than any of those other shows.

Yes, that's what "overrated" means.
posted by Etrigan at 8:00 AM on July 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

At first I was surprised that Survivor made the underrated list, but it made perfect sense once I saw that blurb was written by Brian Moylan, whose recaps of Real Housewives of New York for Gawker were high art themselves.
posted by ejs at 8:12 AM on July 27, 2016

If you were the right age to be living like the 6, you got a distinct, almost pornographic joy from watching 6 people in your station in life, living pretty much like you lived, except, get this: without constantly being jammed in each other's armpits from being crowded into a small, tiny, non-airconditioned, tiny apartment.

Which is why Australian soaps are so popular in the UK; there are good-looking, sexy people who speak the same language and socialise around drinking beer, only they live in huge houses on quarter-acre blocks, have barbecues on the beach, and generally don't look like they've been beaten down by life.
posted by acb at 8:15 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I watch a lot of TV and I'm a fan of some shows to the point where I can jump in and keep going with the episode when one line is mentioned. I get comfort and joy from TV, but I have no idea what the author(s) of this article expect to get out of TV. It's apparent in the first lines of the article that we're viewing entertainment differently.

Here’s my theory: despite what they may claim, nobody loves Friends. Nobody on the entire planet has ever felt a genuine whoosh of love when they realised it was on.

Sure, but do other shows do that for you? Those are feelings I get for my wife, kids, friends, or even dog. But no TV show is ever going to give me a 'whoosh of love' no matter how much I like it. I'd write this off as hyperbole, but the article continues with this kind of argument throughout.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 8:16 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

The times I was unable to avoid seeing Friends (due to sharing houses with TV junkies), it struck me as being just another corny sitcom with a laugh track and everything, no different to Who's The Boss or Full House or any other product of the US sitcom industry since the 1970s or so, populated by cardboard cutouts who communicated by throwing one-liners at each other. I was particularly struck by the way that the actors would break the fourth wall and mug at the camera when the laugh track played after one of them uttered a zinger.
posted by acb at 8:19 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I would get far more excited for early episodes of BSG than the thought of having kids.
posted by biffa at 8:20 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

The absolute best part of any Seinfeld episode I ever saw was the last minute of the very last episode of the show. It's Jerry, doing his stand up routine in prison. And no one is laughing. Dead silence for all of his "jokes." And then finally someone in the audience shouts "You suck, I'm gonna cut you!" It was amazing. I finally laughed at something in a Seinfeld episode. Someone had finally said what I thought about the show. Seinfeld would have been vastly improved if Jerry had been physically assaulted in most episodes. It could have been a great forerunner for Ow, My Balls! At least that way it would have been smarter and funnier.

I read something about how Jerry Seinfeld was getting dis-invited from colleges because students didn't want to see him. And I thought "at least the new generation has taste."

As for the others: Friends is mindless. I don't want to like it, but I find myself laughing with it quite a bit. I stopped watching Downton Abbey pretty early on, I'm not a huge fan of soaps. I never started Lost, and when I thought about it, I had already seen Alias go off the rails and didn't trust J.J. Abrams. I'm not going to be smug here, but I will note that every show he starts well, he screw up by the end (Alias, Lost, Fringe, Revolution started out dull but would have gotten worse). Never watched the West Wing or Mad Men, so no comment on those. Arrested Development is perhaps the best cringe comedy around. If only it didn't make me want to claw out my eyes and puncture my eardrums. If anyone ever wanted to do a Clockwork Orange torture on me, all they'd need would be the complete series. Walking Dead, well, the fact that every single society in the series either has a dark secret, is run by a mad man, is run by an evil man or is weak enough that it is bowing down to one of the previous three gets old. I know that finding a well guarded place where they could just be peaceful and safe would be boring. But the unreality is just getting to me.

As for BSG, it started with such promise. The miniseries was good, the first episode was amazing, the first season was really enjoyable. If only they'd figured out where they were going from the beginning.
posted by Hactar at 8:22 AM on July 27, 2016

130 comments, and not a single mention of "conversations around the water cooler the next morning"? This is not the '90s I remember!
posted by clawsoon at 8:24 AM on July 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

To clarify, I'm using "soap opera" in the sense of "melodramatic, unrealistic plots primarily centered around which two characters are married/dating/hooking up, and how other characters react to those two characters' relationship".

This is why I'm describing Mad Men as a soap. Pretty much any episode of Mad Men can be summarized as:
-Who is Don Draper banging?
-Does his wife know?
-Do other people know, and might they tell his wife?
-Who is Roger Sterling banging?
-Are any other characters banging?
-Does something happen at the office?

There is very little that happens on the show that doesn't revolve around Don Draper and/or Roger Sterling banging some rando, to the point where, if you edited out the Draper/Sterling scenes with their love interests of the moment, you'd probably be left with less than a full season of material, and it would be exceeding boring (e.g. Colin Hanks as a priest eating dinner at Peggy's family's house, Paul Kinsey becoming a Hare Krishna).
posted by kevinbelt at 8:25 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

All this makes me wonder whether there exists a show that is universally liked

Wipeout, (2008-2014) because it had no pretensions and was enjoyed for exactly the same reasons by everyone who watched it.
posted by bracems at 8:32 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

All this makes me wonder whether there exists a show that is universally liked

Wipeout

I know people who criticized it as ableist.
posted by Etrigan at 8:34 AM on July 27, 2016

Yada yada yada, all your favorite shows are garbage.
posted by oceanview at 8:34 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Isn't the "soap opera" complaint more like, "How is it possible that so many rare, bad things could happen to one group of people, in such a particular order as to maximize the badness?"

This kind of gets back to my comment about the phrase being applied, usually, to relationship-driven shows, normally relationship-driven dramas (such shows are often coded feminine, I think, but not always). Consider this my defense of "soap operas." NOTE: I do not have any expertise in this area, but this is a thing I've thought about a lot, albeit not related to the phrase "soap opera" until now.

Like, plot drives conflict. Many shows create a framework - say, it's set in a drug gang or a fantasy world or a zombie-infested post-apocalypse - that facilitates the creation of conflict. When there's a shootout on Breaking Bad (note: I have seen one episode of Breaking Bad, to my shame. I think there are shootouts sometimes?), nobody complains because, hey, it's a show about drug gangs and drug gangs shoot each other. When dragons burn a village on Game of Thrones, nobody complains because, hey, it's set in a fantasy world that that has dragons.

But relationship-driven dramas use the relationships to drive the plot. The problem is that most relationships simply don't have that much conflict, or at least that much high-stakes conflict. So, they need to escalate somehow. This can be handled artfully (I think Mad Men generally did it well), but this need to escalate to generate the conflict that drives the plot forward is pretty much guaranteed to lead to some crazy scenarios. This usually takes the form of a persistent level of relationship conflict that is simply hard to believe, or some weird zany things that happens more-or-less out of the blue, or both.

The outlandishness of these plots is further magnified by the fact that the relationship-driven drama is typically set in a place that bears at least some reasonable resemblance to day-to-day reality. Note that it might be your day-to-day reality, but it's usually quite clearly a day-to-day reality. Because of this, when something occurs that clearly does not fit in it really stands out in a way that it might not on other shows.

I'm going to take two famous incidents from Mad Men and The Sopranos, respectively, to illustrate my point. (SPOILERS AHEAD FOR MAD MEN AND THE SOPRANOS. Also, I love both shows.)

The lawnmower incident on Mad Men came up earlier in this thread, and I've heard it trotted out as an example of outlandish plot antics on Mad Men before. The argument is generally something like this: what are the odds that an executive in a white-collar office by a lawnmower in the office? Even if there's a plot justification for it, really, it just stands out as a thing that is obviously unrealistic.

Now let's compare that to The Sopranos scene where Ralphie beats a stripper to death. Like the lawnmower scene it was gory, it was pretty outlandish, and people have visceral reactions to it, even to this day. And that's understandable: it was arguably the single most brutally violent scene in the show's entire run, which is saying something.

But I've never heard anyone complain about it being unrealistic. Ralphie was in the mafia, was something of a loose cannon, and beating a stripper to death just seems like something that a mafioso-loose-cannon might do. It stood out, even in the show's universe, but not that much. And the reason for this is simple: The fact that The Sopranos is set in the mafia gives its characters license to do crazy things. How many of us are in the mafia? Who knows what they do?

But lots of us work in offices. So when we see a guy get is foot chopped off by a lawnmower in an office we see that and go: that's not realistic.

But, really, what's more likely to happen in your life? Are you more likely to be involved in a mafia-stripper-beating incident, or a grotesque-office-accident-with-heavy-machinery incident? While they're both very unlikely, I'd say that the second is by far likelier for 99% of us.

This is actually one of the things I love about Mad Men. Weird stuff happens on Mad Men, sure, but with the partial exception of the Don's identity thing (which never really goes anywhere), Mad Men does not rely a built-in plot framework to artificially raise the stakes. Think about other critically-acclaimed shows. On The Sopranos, they're in the mafia; on Breaking Bad, they're in a drug gang; on The Americans, they're spies (I'm not saying these are bad shows, by the way, or even that they are worse than Mad Men; just using them as examples). Even on The Wire - which is pretty damn realistic - there's a big drug gang plot. On Mad Men they....work in an advertising agency. Oh, and it happens to be the 1960s. That's really it.

END SPOILERS

It's not easy to get dramatic traction out of situations that resemble day-to-day reality - as most relationship-driven dramas try to do - because day-to-day reality isn't that dramatic, for the most part. So I'm impressed when shows can accomplish it. But it's a hard thing to do, and obvious over-reaches kind of come with the territory.
posted by breakin' the law at 8:38 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

breakin' the law: The fact that The Sopranos is set in the mafia gives its characters license to do crazy things. How many of us are in the mafia? Who knows what they do?

Says the guy with "breakin' the law" as his handle.
posted by clawsoon at 9:11 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is one of those posts where I find out that despite coming out of most threads feeling like I'm an idiot for just consuming middle-of-the-road, mainstream media, I am also somehow not consuming mainstream media, and haven't been for years.

To wit: Of all the shows mentioned up top, I have watched the first season of Lost and the final episode of Seinfeld, nothing else.
posted by Four Ds at 9:17 AM on July 27, 2016

I'm not sure those things are comparable breakin', if I saw someone lose their foot in a bizarre gardening accident in my office it would become a go to anecdote for months. I tend to keep quiet about the Mafia related stripper murders.
posted by biffa at 9:18 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have watched the first season of Lost and the final episode of Seinfeld

Oddly the last episode of Lost and the last episode of Seinfeld are sort of mirror images of each other. I would much prefer the last episode of Lost to basically be the last episode of Seinfeld. And the last episode of Battlestar Galactica to be basically the last episode of Seinfeld, too. In fact, I think most television shows could be improved by having the last episode just being a court summarizing all the characters' awfulnesses, really.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 9:20 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

I love scrambled eggs. My wife prefers fried, sunny side up. My son always wants his eggs hard boiled. Who is right and who wrong?
posted by Postroad at 9:30 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Came to make sure nobody was talking shit about Taxi, will see myself out again.
posted by maxsparber at 9:36 AM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Postroad: I love scrambled eggs. My wife prefers fried, sunny side up. My son always wants his eggs hard boiled. Who is right and who wrong?

You are all wrong. That's not a question you even need to ask.
posted by clawsoon at 9:37 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think the framework/relationship plot driver distinction is oversimplifying. For one thing, although they're set in specialized worlds, The Wire and Breaking Bad are both very much relationship-driven shows; they're just not romantic relationships. NBC even used the tagline "it's about relationships" for Friday Night Lights advertising. They use their settings to drive plot and set up situations, but one of the reasons The Wire is so critically revered, while other cop shows like Law & Order are just meh, is because it captures the human drama of the situation so well.

It's interesting that you cited the Sopranos, because that's the genius of the show. Yes, they're in the Mafia, but so much of the show (the first two seasons, at least) is so banal and mundane. It's a show about a middle-aged guy, his family, his overbearing mother, and his therapist, and he just happens to be a mob boss. It's not a coincidence that the show gets weaker when they focus on the Mafia aspect. Likewise, my favorite parts of the first season of the Wire are when D'Angelo, Wallace, Boadie, and Poot are just sitting around in the Pit - when D teaches them how to play chess, when they talk about the inventor of Chicken McNuggets, when Wallace tries to object to Boadie's characterization of Alexander Hamilton as a "dead president", etc. They may be drug dealers, but their day-to-day lives are a lot like mine. I think those things - middle aged guy in therapy for anxiety, young kids talking about McNuggets - are a lot more realistic than a dude getting his foot chopped off in a lawnmower. And besides, the lawnmower scene did nothing to advance the plot. It was just a set piece, a waste of time.

Second, there are plenty of shows premised entirely on romantic relationships that don't come anywhere near soap opera territory. Take Friends, for example. People don't like it (and I sympathize, although it's kind of a nostalgic guilty pleasure for me), but no one ever calls it a soap opera, even though (SPOILER ALERT, but if you don't know this already, you won't care) four of the six main characters are coupled together by the end of the show, and nearly all of the show until then involves the six characters carrying on various other romantic relationships. The difference between Friends and Mad Men is that the relationships are realistic on Friends. They didn't just write in characters for one of the six to have sex with because that's what the audience expects. The six characters' paramours did not lust after them because the essential premise of the show was their inexplicable sexual magnetism. They were believable people (side note: I have a co-worker who laughs like Janice!) who met the main characters, developed relationships over several episodes, and ended the relationships for plausible reasons.

Another example (that nobody considers great TV, but is actually pretty funny): Everybody Loves Raymond. It's a show that is about nothing but relationships - Ray and Deborah, Ray and his mother, Deborah and her in-laws, etc. It's often cheesy as hell, with old school "the moral of the story is..." moments. And I would guess, based on anecdotal evidence, that the majority of its audience is female. But nobody would ever classify it as a soap opera. To even think of Raymond as a soap stretches the concept of soap opera so far as to be unrecognizable.

So to say soap operas are relationship-based and therefore more interesting than shows with a more extraordinary setting is just not accurate.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:39 AM on July 27, 2016

I had already seen Alias go off the rails and didn't trust J.J. Abrams. I'm not going to be smug here, but I will note that every show he starts well, he screw up by the end (Alias, Lost, Fringe, Revolution started out dull but would have gotten worse).

To be fair he creates the shows and lets them go. In the last 3 seasons of Alias it looks like he only wrote or co-wrote about 3 episodes. On Lost, he seems to have had barely any involvement in writing or directing; maybe a half dozen episodes episodes over the course of the series with a writing or directing credit. Fringe, he seems to have been pretty heavily involved in season 1, pretty limited involvement with season 2, and then gone. Revolution I never actually heard of but he isn't credited with writing or directing any of it--he's one of a a number of "executive producers"

The parts where he is actually in the mix writing and directing and not just overseeing production tend to be pretty good, and are often the parts of the show people like before the shows jump the shark.
posted by Hoopo at 9:55 AM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

There is very little that happens on the show that doesn't revolve around Don Draper and/or Roger Sterling banging some rando, to the point where, if you edited out the Draper/Sterling scenes with their love interests of the moment, you'd probably be left with less than a full season of material, and it would be exceeding boring

Wrong and wrong and wrong. I mean, you've got Lane being smitten by America, helping engineer a heist (turning SC into SCDP), falling victim to the American temptations of living beyond his means, and literally killing himself with debt. You've got Joan, who starts out as a nasty and extremely disciplined queen bee, beset by heartache and gradually becoming more sympathetic as she slowly comes to terms with her self-worth, her abilities, and all the cages she's been put in. (You've got Betty doing the same thing less successfully, without finding a way to support herself and coming to a more tragic end.) You've got Peggy (the real star of the show) and Pete both consumed by spite and career ambitions, but often making surprisingly and genuinely good strides forward. You've got Sally: I mean, come on, Sally. I could write a whole essay about Megan, who I found a lot more interesting than most, but I suppose you'd file her under "someone Don's banging." But still: wrong.
posted by psoas at 10:00 AM on July 27, 2016 [16 favorites]

I love Sorkin's writing to death, but The Newsroom has nothing on Studio 60's "this comedy show is the most important broadcast in the history of television" brand of pretentious.
posted by dances with hamsters at 10:15 AM on July 27, 2016

i haven't read the article yet but anytime someone talks shit on ross geller my heart is warmed
posted by burgerrr at 10:47 AM on July 27, 2016

I would get far more excited for early episodes of BSG than the thought of having kids.

I'd be more excited about having kids if it wasn't for seasons 13-17.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:53 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

We were on a break!!!
posted by ocschwar at 10:54 AM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Well, I don't watch tv.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:56 AM on July 27, 2016

thirtysomething

Yet the show had a cancer storyline which is as good as anything I've seen on TV

And a fantastic soundtrack.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:57 AM on July 27, 2016

Lost seems to be a more complicated, less entertaining Gilligans Island.
posted by jonmc at 10:57 AM on July 27, 2016

Some of the things I love about Mad Men are the beautiful, poignant moments. Reducing it to a meandering soap opera ignores the complexity of the characters and the deep ambivalence that accompanies every action. I liked how it was a show about people who were ultimately lonely, conflicted, and complex against the technicolor backdrop of the 1960s.
posted by delight at 11:04 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

And I could say much the same about Downton Abbey as well -- difficult, fraught choices against an interesting cultural backdrop. Soap-y things happen but the plot isn't entirely driven by those events.
posted by delight at 11:08 AM on July 27, 2016

Twin Peaks could be reduced to a soap opera. In fact, the show reduced itself to a soap opera, with the show-tithin-a-show Invitation to Love paralleling and often preceding the events of the show.

In summary: Soap operas are great.
posted by maxsparber at 11:09 AM on July 27, 2016

I liked how it was a show about people who were ultimately lonely, conflicted, and complex against the technicolor backdrop of the 1960s.

This is literally the history of soap operas. They were named that because housewives in the 60s watched stories about the human condition while they washed things with soap.

If you assume "soap opera" is an insult, that's on you.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 11:10 AM on July 27, 2016

I think the general concensus for a term like "soap opera" means dramatic events occur for their own sake instead of dramatic events that add to a character's progression.

This is where I think shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos succeed. Yes, weird things happen, but events always cause a character to grow, or reveal something about them to the audience. I almost left it a "grow a character" but I think in Tony Soprano's case the point was he never learned from the things that happened to and around him. For Walter White, events revealed the person who he was the whole time.

Compared to Friends, where Chandler never stops being a homophobe, Monica only gets more controlly. I had to stop watching both Battlestar Galactica and Downton Abbey because crazy shit would happen, only to leave things back at the status quo.
posted by frecklefaerie at 11:13 AM on July 27, 2016

They were named that because housewives in the 60s watched stories about the human condition while they washed things with soap.

The term comes from the heavy sponsorship of daytime dramas by soap companies.

If you assume "soap opera" is an insult, that's on you.

Nonsense. It's been used dismissively for decades.
posted by Etrigan at 11:16 AM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

I think the general concensus for a term like "soap opera" means dramatic events occur for their own sake instead of dramatic events that add to a character's progression.

You may be right, although I have to say it has made me think of how strange our approach to drama is. Because of course events happen for their own sake. That's the way events happen. The world does things without concern for us or our character growth.

Interestingly, the "stuff happening for its own sake" probably emerges from melodrama, which is the basis for a lot of stuff we still have in popular dramatic mediums.

Nonsense. It's been used dismissively for decades.

And it has been sexist for decades. Soap operas are primarily dismissed by people who don't watch them, and they are mostly dismissed because they target a female audience, not because of anything inherent to the show. It's a longer discussion, but every single thing leveled at a soap opera is true of -- and celebrated -- in mainstream entertainment, but in soap operas these are considered somehow embarrassing or mediocre because of the audience.
posted by maxsparber at 11:19 AM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

This has made me think that TV seems to have replaced music as the thing that young people are passionate about and define themselves by. Music has become something that people flip around and listen to in the background. I couldn't imagine most people having some of these conversations about TV in the past.

But there really wasn't much niche TV in the past, now it all is.
posted by bongo_x at 11:35 AM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think the general concensus for a term like "soap opera" means dramatic events occur for their own sake instead of dramatic events that add to a character's progression.

Yeah I agree with this. Walking Dead and Sons of Anarchy were both lousy for this particular reason. A basic plot mechanism would occur for the simple sake of pitting two or more characters against one another, said characters would spend the next few episodes trying to kill one another, then something else would happen and they would suddenly be united against a different character. It all tends to feel a lot like pro wrestling storylines.

Someone upthread questioned why Friends and Everyone Loves Raymond were never categorized as soap operas - I think there's a very basic element overlooked that prevents this: the laugh track.
posted by mannequito at 12:09 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't think there's anything wrong with soap operas, I just think they don't necessarily deserve as much praise or close examination as other works. They don't expose as many fundamental truths about the human existence or about current events, or whatever. Sorta like this: "What Game of Thrones Can Teach Us About UX Design."
posted by Apocryphon at 12:16 PM on July 27, 2016

a fiendish thingy: "This is literally the history of soap operas. They were named that because housewives in the 60s watched stories about the human condition while they washed things with soap."

It was housewives in the '30s listening on the radio and the name is because they were sponsored by soap companies.
posted by octothorpe at 12:19 PM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

The only justification for Seinfeld is that it paved the road to Always Sunny, which improved on the formula in every way by making it explicitly clear from the beginning that all the lead characters are scumbags instead of waiting 'til the last episode to admit it.

Walking Dead is a slightly different animal than some of the other examples because it has source material lined up for years, so they can only go so far off from the original. (As compared to Game of Thrones, in which there will be no more books and the TV writers are now on their own.)
posted by delfin at 12:19 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I thought it was because laundromats usually put them on the TV for people waiting for their clothes
posted by Apocryphon at 12:19 PM on July 27, 2016

It was housewives in the '30s listening on the radio and the name is because they were sponsored by soap companies.

Whatever. The only thing about the term "soap opera" that's demeaning is the lack of a similar catch-all term for genres of lad-fodder like airport thriller novels, action shows, pro-wrestling, grind house flicks, and the like.

Oh, wait, did I just coin a term?

And I'll readily admit my vice was a spandex opera called X-Men back when I was a lad.
posted by ocschwar at 12:32 PM on July 27, 2016

This has made me think that TV seems to have replaced music as the thing that young people are passionate about and define themselves by. Music has become something that people flip around and listen to in the background. I couldn't imagine most people having some of these conversations about TV in the past.

But there really wasn't much niche TV in the past, now it all is.

This is a very interesting idea.
posted by emjaybee at 12:56 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

The only thing about the term "soap opera" that's demeaning is the lack of a similar catch-all term for genres of lad-fodder like airport thriller novels, action shows, pro-wrestling, grind house flicks, and the like.

Wrestling has been called "soap opera for men" for years now.
posted by Etrigan at 1:00 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Soap operas are primarily dismissed by people who don't watch them, and they are mostly dismissed because they target a female audience, not because of anything inherent to the show.

Since we finally got a PVR, my wife has been recording 3 soaps daily. I have been watching way more of them than I ever wanted to, and sorry but I would forgive anyone for thinking they are just terrible. The pacing alone...I mean it's like they have minor variations on the same conversations for months at a time. They also don't seem interested in doing any reading up on how things they've decided to turn into major plot points work, and they occasionally add these terrible soundtrack songs that make me think they are trying to launch a side project for some friend of the producer's kid or something. The characters are basically cartoon characters, and complete flakes at that that routinely pull 180s that don't make sense just so something can happen that week. It all comes off as an amateurish production put together for shits and giggles by a bunch of good looking friends with a lot of time on their hands. And for the record, the production quality on soap operas does not compare favorably to most other mainstream TV, and when they get ambitious, it is often laughably bad.

I'll grant that it could easily be viewed as funny and campy, because I like some things that are bad in similar ways. But at the same time, if someone wants to dismiss a bunch of my favorite Sam Raimi or John Carpenter stuff, it's at least completely understandable to me why some people think it's pretty dumb.
posted by Hoopo at 1:07 PM on July 27, 2016

Yes, 90 percent of soap operas are crud. You know what else is 90 percent crud?

Everything.
posted by maxsparber at 1:24 PM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

90% of X-Men is crap, and that's the best soap opera of all.
posted by Artw at 2:09 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

There are several different aspects of the "dismissing soap opera = misogyny" discussion.

One is when someone uses "soap opera" to dismiss a melodramatic show while not using the term when talking about a show they like which features the same basic structure. For example, as someone mentioned above, X-Men (the comic, not the movie series). If you dismiss some show as a soap opera but enjoy X-Men and do not call it a soap opera, you're using soap opera purely as an insult, and given that soap opera is so often gendered, yeah, that's may be sexism.

Another is when someone uses "soap opera" to describe all melodramatic shows, both the ones that someone likes and the ones that someone doesn't. If, considering the X-Men example, a person said "Days of Our Lives is a soap opera. It sucks. X-Men is also a soap opera. I love it," that would not be sexist. It's using soap opera as a value-neutral genre description.

A third is when someone uses "soap opera" to describe all melodramatic shows, and dislikes all (or almost all) those melodramatic shows. This would be someone who dislikes Days of Our Lives and X-Men and Mad Men and pro wrestling. This is not sexist, despite the term "soap opera" being coded female.

My mom hates sci-fi. Pretty much all of it. Sci-fi is coded male (sure, there are a lot of female viewers, but we're talking coding, not actual fan base). That doesn't make her sexist. If she used the word "sci-fi" to dismiss SF she didn't like, while at the same time enjoying Star Wars and Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, then, sure, she'd be being sexist, using the male coded word to dismiss stuff she disliked but not using it to refer to the stuff she liked. But she dislikes sci-fi across the board and that is okay, even though it's traditionally male coded. Likewise, disliking soap operas is okay, even though it's traditionally female coded.
posted by Bugbread at 3:30 PM on July 27, 2016

You people are picky and crazy, no offense. Time magazine once described Lost as having the most compelling narrative in television history, and I most thoroughly agree. If they had kept the show running into its present umpteenth season I'd still be enjoying the heck out it. Beats zombies and vampires, anyways.
posted by Chitownfats at 4:00 PM on July 27, 2016

Chitownfats: "You people are picky and crazy, no offense."

This "no offense," I do not think it means what you think it means.
posted by Bugbread at 4:01 PM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

Oh, I'm pretty certain it means "irony intended to increase the sting with no mitigating effect actually intended". No?
posted by Chitownfats at 4:58 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

"You've got Lane..."

Lane Pryce was a sympathetic character, but "English dude moves to America and goes into debt" hardly sounds like the premise of a great show. I mean, a good writer can work with anything, but that's meager. Lane was entirely absent from the interesting plotlines, such that you could edit him out and not materially affect the story at all.

"You've got Joan..." Interesting character, but not developed enough.

"You've got Betty..." Who is one of the most intolerable characters in tv history.

"You've got Pete..." Trying to think of a single interesting thing involving Pete Campbell. I kind of remember the scene where he sits in his office with a gun being poignant, but that's about it.

"I found [Megan] more interesting than most..." I did too, actually. But like Joan, she was severely underwritten. And like Lane, she's absent from (most of) the most interesting plotlines.

"You've got Peggy..." Ok, now we're getting somewhere. There are a lot of people who argue that Mad Men is actually the Peggy Olson story. Would that it were! How much more interesting it would have been. The Peggy story is one of the reasons I watched as long as I did. The character is well-written, Elisabeth Moss is a great actress, and the story arc is both interesting on a personal level and important on a social level. So why does her story take a back seat to Don's hookup of the month club in nearly every episode? There were weird things about Peggy, too - the Andy Warhol Factory lesbian stuff seemed gratuitous - but I'd prefer that to any scene involving Don after the second season.
posted by kevinbelt at 5:50 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Counter-argument
posted by Artw at 5:58 PM on July 27, 2016

Counter-counter-argument
posted by Bugbread at 6:05 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also, thanks, Artw, I didn't know that was possible. Funky.
posted by Bugbread at 6:05 PM on July 27, 2016

Proper link, for you enjoyment
posted by Artw at 6:07 PM on July 27, 2016

Also we should take a moment to remember the time Peggy stabbed Frank Zappa with an improvised spear.

TEAM PEGASUS 4-EVAH!

PIZZA HOUSE!

STICK-KNIFE!
posted by Artw at 6:10 PM on July 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

seven beautiful young people can live large in Manhattan without a million dollar parental subsidy or without eating dog food or work exchanging sex for drugs it's actually extremely witty and well written.

From the Friends wiki:

Monica's grandmother is the official tenant and lived there before Monica. After she moved to Florida, Monica stayed in the apartment, sub-letting the apartment illegally (this also covers the fact that Monica could afford such an expensive apartment with her chef's salary);

You can call that hackneyed writing, but the show never pretended that any of the Friends could have afforded that apartment any other way. Also, Phoebe used to be homeless, and there was at least one episode that dealt with the income disparity within the group. (The one with Hootie and the Blowfish tickets.)
posted by Room 641-A at 6:36 PM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Soap operas are melodramatic. Mad Men is not melodramatic. It's almost the opposite of melodrama.
posted by Automocar at 9:25 AM on July 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Your point is moo.
posted by 4ster at 12:00 PM on July 28, 2016

Mad Men is not melodramatic. It's almost the opposite of melodrama.

Melodrama doesn't have to look like Ugly Betty, though. Despite being quiet and slow-moving and having a flavor of realism, Mad Men has a lot of melodramatic elements, like pathos, heightened emotionalism, and sensationalism (Don's endless womanizing, the calculated shock value of seeing 1960s-era behaviors like flagrant littering and smoking while pregnant, the freaking lawnmower). The realistic style isn't disqualifying. From Wikipedia: According to Singer, late Victorian and Edwardian melodrama combined a conscious focus on realism in stage sets and props with "anti-realism" in character and plot.

This article is ultimately more positive than I am about Mad Men but I think it gets the point across:

The soap archetypes are all there: hidden identities (Don Draper/Bob Benson), corporate intrigue (the changing of the guard at SCDP), secret pregnancies (Peggy), secret paternities (Joan's son), divorce and quick remarriages (Don and Betty), absurd moments (the lawnmower incident), amnesia (Pete's mistress), and even return-from-the-dead (Don Draper died in the war).

posted by en forme de poire at 2:13 PM on July 28, 2016

I just can't cope with Seinfeld, the "show about nothing," because it is actually a show about some mean, supposedly funny people's day-to-day lives, and in my pretty nothing day-to-day life, MY friends are both meaner and actually very funny.
posted by thebrokedown at 4:15 PM on July 28, 2016

^^^with regard to meanness on Seinfeld, did you know the most offensive line ever uttered on TV came from Seinfeld? It's true!

When George eats the eclair out of the trash can, Jerry responds: "You have crossed the line that separates Man and Bum."
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 7:17 PM on July 28, 2016

That's offensive, but I'm fairly certain Archie Bunker had a line that bad or worse every single episode.
posted by Bugbread at 7:34 PM on July 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Of course, Seinfeld did deliver unto us one thirty second slice of comedy gold, at least.
posted by Existential Dread at 8:47 PM on July 28, 2016

For melodrama, I would love to see a project that made Mad Men in a Douglas Sirk style!
posted by rhizome at 1:28 PM on July 30, 2016

Game of Thrones to Sherlock – Guardian readers' most overrated TV shows
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:41 AM on August 2, 2016

The last season of Sherlock was so insulting that I'm pretty sure I'm done with it.
posted by octothorpe at 6:25 AM on August 2, 2016

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